On a crisp autumn evening recently, we were leaving a scenic national park near sunset after a lovely day of sight-seeing. As our car wound through the darkening mountains, I reflected on the brilliant, flaming foliage we had seen on every side now obscured by nightfall.
"If someone drove through these mountains now, he would be completely unaware of the beauties surrounding him," I thought. Then it occurred to me how often because of darkened, material views of creation we are unaware of the limitless, spiritual good at hand.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 304), "It is ignorance and false belief, based on a material sense of things which hide spiritual beauty and goodness." Through the study of Christian Science many are gaining spiritual enlightenment that not only dispels darkness and fear but reveals the abundance of joy, peace, and dominion that are man's by reflection.
Man is the creation, the very expression, of God, Soul. And this is the being you and I are. Thus, we fully reflect the divine attributes of loveliness, wholeness, and satisfaction. In the realm of Soul, where man really dwells, there is no disease, dissention, or disunity. All is continuously controlled by God's law of harmony and beauty.
Christ Jesus looked upon each individual as a child of God. He beheld each one in his true spiritual light and loveliness, Despite the mortal pictures of sin, sickness, and disfigurement often presented to him, our Master was able to differentiate between the erroneous, mortal concept of man and the genuine child of God.
Only his divinely derived ability to see the beautiful, unblemished image as real enabled Jesus to heal. Where unenlightened, mortal eyes could see only distortion and ugliness, he beheld the spiritual perfection of the real man. This Christly perception restored the sick and the repentant sinner to their original wholeness and beauty. This same spiritual perception, or understanding, is today available to any humble seeker for Truth, as many students of Christian Science are proving.
"Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law," prayed the Psalmist (Psalms 119:18) As we pray for increased spiritual discernment, desiring to see only God's perfect creation, we will find the heavenly light of spiritual understanding dispelling the darkness of material thinking. Discord, disease, and unloveliness cannot long abide in the experience of one whose thought has been illumined by the light of such understanding.
There are no human circumstances so hopelessly dark that the omnipotent glow of spiritual perception cannot penetrate. Even as the first rays of morning sunlight reveal the loveliness of the material universe, so a glimpse of infinite Truth pierces inharmony, strife, and disorder, bringing clearly into focus the glorious handiwork of Soul, God.
